"and indeed the first step toward finding out is to acknowledge you do not satisfactorily know already; so that no blight can so surely arrest all intellectual growth as the blight of cocksureness; and ninety-nine out of every hundred good heads are reduced to impotence by that malady...
Indeed, out of a contrite fallibilism, combined with a high faith in the reality of knowledge, and an intense desire to find things out, all my philosophy has always seemed to me to grow" (C.S. Peirce)

Friday, August 13, 2010

Coronal Mass Ejection

There was a "viscous, colloidal fog" that temporarily took the form of a garden.There were 30 seconds of weightlessness.There was a burst of light and wind; later, all that remained was "a mountain of disjointed facts that strain credulity."(The austral summer is 5 months of no nighttime.)Someone said "shame will save humanity."

Each cuts a certain figure socially, appears to be a certain type of person; the signs they present and produce are read according to the nearest familiar type connoted, and then further experiences (additional signs) modify this initial reading---overturn it, refine it, complicate it, and/or cement it.

Each must relive the event via the intensely subjective memory of catastrophe that is lodged like shrapnel in the mind.